ABSTRACT
This essay first appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985): 23-50.
I T is safe to say that few people have read John Lydgate’s Siege o f Thebes or the anonymous Tale o f Beryn, two fifteenth-century attempts to continue the literary journey and tale-telling of Chaucer’s unfinished masterpiece.1 Yet in a real sense very few people have read The Canterbury Tales. What they have experienced is a modem fabrication by Skeat, Robinson, Baugh, Fisher, and other editors who offer the poem as a single work, albeit marred by gaps and rough edges, but nonetheless recounting what was said on a one-way trip from Southwerk to the outskirts of Canterbury. This is technically a fabrication because no surviving manuscript arranges the fragments in an order which gives perfect geographical support to this design-not without the notorious “Bradshaw shift”—and no single manuscript, not even Ellesmere, contains all the tales and links to be found in a modem edition with its scholarly conflations.
